Linger
by carrafin
Summary: Waiting is For Idiots.  It starts with a wintry night, a little boy, a girl on the streets; a damsel and her savoir. GinRan.


**Title:** Linger (Waiting is for Idiots)  
><strong>Pairing:<strong> Gin x Rangiku  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG

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><p><strong>Linger<strong>

_Or, We Only Part to Meet Again_

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><p>i.<p>

It starts with a wintry night, a little boy, a girl on the streets; a damsel and her savoir.

* * *

><p>ii.<p>

Before she met him she knew no love, no sorrow, no loneliness. Her world was a big blank nothingness. Night melted into day melted into hunger melted into isolation melted into a dull hollowness. She existed for the sake of existence. She was never sad because she didn't know happiness; she was never lost because she did not have a place to go back to.

So when she first hears these words -

'Here, eat.'

- she is surprised to feel the subtlest of change within her. The unfolding of a certain warmth, a lightness in her heart she never felt before. She wills herself to move her chapped lips.

'...you are?'

* * *

><p>iii.<p>

'So,' she asks, three weeks after she meets him. They sit atop one of his persimmon plants, nestling in the tree's thick branches. 'Why'd you save me?'

His answer is simple, and enigmatic, as always. 'Because I saw you.'

Hardly an acceptable answer, but she does not pursue the matter any further. It takes her a little time, but she gets used to all his quirks and idiosyncrasies. (She finds them almost endearing). A wrinkled nose spells annoyance, a sneer actually means a smile, and - she finds this the most fascinating by far - his eyes turn a deeper shade of blue when he is pleased.

He catches her watching and his lips twist up with the slightest hint of a sneer.

* * *

><p>iv.<p>

She learns from him that happiness is, fundamentally, different from satisfaction. A full stomach, warm clothes and a roof over her head gives her satisfaction, but happiness only comes when they sit together, perched atop the persimmon trees, counting stars. (At least, she counts them. He simply watches her count them.)

He teaches her happiness, and, along with that, and equal capacity for sadness, loneliness and longing; feelings that will later plague her for life.

* * *

><p>v.<p>

He first introduces her to loneliness and fear, five years after they first meet. He was going out a lot more than usual, but she does not mind - that is, until he disappears for two weeks in a row.

On the third day of his absence she feels fear like she never felt before. She runs through the persimmon garden, calling out his name, each time louder and tinged with greater desperation, worry bordering on the edge of panic. On the tenth day she eats raw persimmon - the first morsel of food she consumes in four days - and throws up, simply because the taste reminded her of him, overpoweringly so.

He comes backs on the fourteenth day, silver hair matted with specks of dried brown blood, with a new heaviness in his footsteps and shadows underneath his eyes. She is torn between running into his arms and wringing his neck, so she settles for something in between - she rushes up to him, throws her arms around him for a quick hug, and then throws a punch right into his gut that he either does not or cannot dodge. And then she hugs him again, a proper hug this time.

He runs his hands down her blonde locks, patting her almost a little awkwardly. She looks at him straight into the eye. Brown meets electric blue meets longing meets fear meets relief meets reproach. _Don't do that again._

_I won't. _

They both know that he is lying, but then they smile and pretend that he is saying the truth anyway.

* * *

><p>vi.<p>

He starts to disappear again and again, both literally and figuratively. She wakes up each day with a tightness in her chest - _is Gin gone, is he still here _- that will either disappear upon the sight of his sleeping form, or further constrict upon the lack thereof.

So she tries to commit into memory the very last bit of detail about him, to tide her through the days when he goes away. When he is around she glances at him every now and then, willing herself to remember. Even decades later - when things happened that they both could never have imagined - she does not, cannot forget the blueness of his eyes (those eyes that, like life, burned, lured, criticized, loved), the roughness of his hands as they held onto each other in front of the fireplace, the silver of his silken hair, the ghost of a smile on his pale face. He made sure of that.

Yet a girl can only see so much, touch so much, feel so much. She can only remember so much. Some days she finds him hidden away in the deepest recesses of her memory, transient, fleeting, as feeble as the distant memory of a child's mind. Yet in other days she sees him in everything; see him in the blossoming of persimmon buds in the summer, feels his touch in the angry bitterness of the biting winter winds; detects his presence in the vitality of spring and nostalgia of autumn.

When he goes she walks through the persimmon garden, trying to give purpose to her restless legs, retracing the path they once took. She thinks about him, thinks about thinking about him. And when it all became too much to bear she takes up drinking, because, while sake is not a perfect substitute for Gin (though they were similar in that they are both addictive, burned, and bad for her), the bitterness of the drink does help in letting her get by.

(Some days, though, as she works her way through bottles and bottles of sake, willing to drink herself into oblivion, the world reduced to nothing but a huge blur, she finds that she still cannot fill up the emptiness within her.

And she feels so alone.)

* * *

><p>vii.<p>

She doesn't feel surprised when he announces his decision to become a shinigami. She doesn't ask why, either, she knows him well enough to know that he will not give her a satisfactory answer.

So she merely looks up, into his eyes, and tries to send the message across to him for one last time -

-_ why do you keeping going where I can't follow?_

* * *

><p>viii.<p>

_And there is blood and despair everywhere; the scent of loss and false hope lingers in the air._

_Her fingers curl around his back, shaking, desperate. She cradles him in her arms, she tries to speak, to tell her that she is sorry, that she forgives him for leaving her, that she was never angry or upset with him in the first place, not really, that he really, really needn't apologize, but all that comes out is a choked cry of his name, laced with anguish and helplessness._

_This is the last time he's leaving her._

_This time she knows that, once he departs, he will not be coming back._

* * *

><p>ix.<p>

_He looks at her through his bloodied silver locks._

_He knew that that would be a reckoning for his actions. He knew, the very moment when he approached Aizen, pledging to lay down his absolute loyalty and his life, that it would all come down to this. That he would die. But no amount of mental preparedness could have protected him from this - from the whirlpool of pain in her eyes._

_Everything has gone horribly wrong._

_He selfishly wishes that he can see her smile before he leaves, for one last time._

* * *

><p>x.<p>

And so he leaves, and once again he leaves nothing behind for her to remember him by. But, she thinks with a touch of sadness and irony, in all his haste to make her forget him, he failed to remember something important: that the heart has other ways of remembering. That when it doesn't have concrete, tangible items to hold on to, it starts to feed on memories.

But she thanks him all the same.

She understands that he wants her to move on, but her heart dictates otherwise. So when it doesn't forget to remember, she wills herself to remember to forget, but it doesn't work, because a rule of life is that when you try to forget something hard enough, you'll end up reliving it with crystal clear clarity. so she gives up. Slowly, over the years, he melts into her subconscious, where he stays cordially, except for some days when resurfaces without warning. She doesn't try to stop it; after all, one does not try to stop breathing.

* * *

><p>xi.<p>

She takes a stroll amid the persimmon garden for the first time in years (it is the only memory of him he forgot to - or perhaps could not bear to - destroy). The flowers are blooming, and it is absolutely beautiful.

She wishes that he is here to see it.

* * *

><p>xii.<p>

The story doesn't end. Not really.

Love burns the brightest, but the brightest flames often leave the deepest scars. His love for her burned with a brilliance that rivaled the brightest flames, and so he continues to live on within her; and in her memory he doesn't die.

She still remembers. She no longer tries to forget. And she is still waiting.

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><p><strong>AN: I had a lot of fun writing this, but for the first time in my life I found it actually <em>painful<em> to write fanficton, probably because of the pairing. GinRan has to be one of the most bittersweet couple ever, not just among but the bleach couples but over all fandoms in general D: and it deserves a lot, a lot more love orz**

**I hope you enjoyed it, I spent an hour trying to edit it and cut out the purple prose /flails/ also, I know that I didn't follow strictly to the canon script, but I couldn't find the chapters available on mangastream and I couldn't be bothered to dig deeper for the chapters where he died. I am sorry D: /dodges away from items thrown by readers/**


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